9 October

I’m not surprised that the October, 14th date is confirmed — for Gruber to throw this around he had to be pretty sure it was true — but I can’t believe how transparent they are with this particular invitation: I mean, you don’t have to be clairvoyant to guess that they will probably unveil new laptops, right?

Regarding the current rumors:

Apple doesn’t need “revolutionary laser- and water-cutting technologies” to manufacture notebooks (they’ve managed to produce the MacBook Air alright already, haven’t they? and why the hell would a single manufacturing process need both lasers and water jets?); and even if they did, there’s no way building, equipping and staffing a brand-new, top-of-the-line revolutionary factory, instead of contracting to cheap Chinese third parties, would make MacBook prices go down.

On the other hand, knowing Steve, there are many reasons why he must be itching to have his own factories again rather than depend on third parties. But he’d want to keep an eye on the factory, so it would have to be in California, and it would double the costs of everything Apple produces. (Not that Steve would mind, but the board probably would, and his powers do have limits.)

I have no reason to believe that today’s leaked casing pictures are fake. MacBook Pros now have chiclet keyboards, obviously, and either the MacBook goes to aluminum (which was the common expectation, although it doesn’t make that much sense to me) or a small MacBook Pro is coming back. Note that the laptop shown on the invitation doesn’t particularly look like aluminum (although it has surprisingly sharp corners for a MacBook).

If anything, the photos tend to prove that the new MacBooks aren’t manufactured in an Apple factory, because even in China an Apple-operated factory wouldn’t let this kind of leak slip through.

The idea of a $800 MacBook makes a lot of sense (even though there’s no reason why Apple Stores would already know about them), now that everyone and their dog is installing OS X on $300 netbooks. And it would also make sense to have a $800 MacBook and a $1200 12- or 13-inch MacBook Pro.

One could dream that the invitation is so MacBook-centered precisely so that we don’t expect the “one more thing” to be a fantastic something-else. But then, there might not be any “one more thing” at all, and Apple doesn’t seem to care that much about suspense any more. I’d like the “Brick” to be the product of the Mac mini and Apple TV merging into a range of multi-purpose devices, but at any rate you shouldn’t expect much, or anything, on the iMac and Mac Pro fronts.

Come to think of it, the invitiation’s graphic would be a perfect depiction of a $400 10-inch MacBook. Plastic shell to cut costs, and sharp corners because you can’t waste any space with this format. But then, the Apple logo might be a little too small for that.

I’ve always considered that, if you needed to resize the text on the pages you viewed, it was your responsibility to use a decent web browser that’s able to resize contents intelligently (which once meant Opera) — just like, if you’re blind, you ought not to be using Internet Explorer. Looks like on this topic like several others, the webdesign community is catching up with me.

14 October

What I got right: There was no way manufacturing a laptop casing by removing bits from a brick of aluminum was going to make it cheaper. And they didn’t need anything more advanced than what they already used for the MacBook Air — I only didn’t realize that the big news was that they were actually going to use the same technology on other laptops.

What I got wrong, though: I hoped that 99% of the keynote wouldn’t be just confirming the month’s rumors (the remaining 1% confirmed years-old rumors about Cinema Displays). And I also expected the updated laptop range to make some kind of sense.

So you’ve got a $1000 13-inch plastic laptop with an old-style design, and it’s called a MacBook. (And that’s definitely too expensive an entry point for the current market.) And you’ve got a $1300 13-inch brand-new aluminium laptop, and it’s called… a MacBook. And at the other end of the range, the $2000 15-inch high-tech laptop is called a MacBook Pro, and the $2800 17-inch old-style design (with no glass screen, glass trackpad, chiclet keyboard, nor the satisfaction of knowing your laptop’s case was carved by 24th-century lasers in a shiny spaceship) is also a MacBook Pro. I’m sorry, but that’s just fucking amateurism.

Not that the Cinema Display range is any better (I’m not even sure I know what their plan is, exactly — it’ll be clearer when the new display is actually available… or as soon as the online Apple Store comes back from its crash). What the hell is going on in Cupertino?

And, yeah, I still want one of each. Obviously. But I’m not particularly sad today that I can’t afford any of them (except for being sad about that fact that I don’t have $2000 at hand).

I wonder whether the MacBook Pro’s wifi chip, which is reportedly embedded behind the screen, is oriented so as to send its signal through the Apple logo, or it uses the aluminium shell as a reflecting dish to amplify the signal and fry the user’s brain.

19 October

Qwitter e-mails you when someone stops following you on Twitter with a message like this:

John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:

What’s the difference between Arial and Helvetica?

Nice idea for a useful service (wish there could be the same thing for blog subscriptions), a bit of humor from the designers, and somehow they manage to do it without even asking you for your password. Cool.